OK so you accepted your partial fellowship offer and lined up your student loans. Think you’re on easy street with financing your MBA education? Make sure you’re thinking like a business professional before you dive in.

Cornell’s early admission decisions for their one-year MBA will be released in a few days, so even if you did not apply to this program, it’s essentially the starting gun for this year’s results. Since over the next several weeks and months applicants the world over will be getting good and bad news from their target schools, it’s a great time to prepare yourself to receive the responses. Will you be getting a “yes” from your top choice?

Getting graded. It’s been a necessary evil in everyone’s life since we were all old enough to hold a crayon. At every stage, we either cut the mustard or we don’t and then progress to the next level of grading. For those applying to graduate school, you may have thought those college grades were all but forgotten, but now find yourself having to face them once again. And guess what? The grading doesn’t stop with the application process, because very soon you’ll be back in the classroom. This begs the question…do grades really matter?

So many applicants these days look alike on paper in terms of experience and education, test scores and outside involvement that even highly qualified candidates get lost in the shuffle. We all think we’re pretty unique until we find out that the next guy also volunteered at a similar NGO, or was promoted to VP before his colleagues. Particularly if you come from a feeder industry such as banking, finance or technology/engineering, it gets harder every year to stand out.

If you are an international applicant, you must have more than just a good GMAT score to differentiate yourself. If you are an American applicant, you need to do whatever you can to press out a decent GMAT score in order to be competitive.

Getting graded. It’s been a necessary evil in everyone’s life since we were all old enough to hold a crayon. At every stage, we either cut the mustard or we don’t and then progress to the next level of grading. For those applying to graduate school, you may have thought those college grades were all but forgotten, but now find yourself having to face them once again. And guess what? The grading doesn’t stop with the application process, because very soon you’ll be back in the classroom. This begs the question…do grades really matter?

While for those who just finished off their third round b-school applications, it’s already time for others to begin thinking about “next season.” Application season begins in earnest after all of last year’s applications are processed, and every final offer of admission is made and filled.

Business school is one of the most lucrative of all graduate degrees in its potential and proven history for embellishing salary. It’s not just in dollars and cents, either, but manifests itself in sheer employment statistics as well.

In case you haven’t noticed, Kellogg recently launched a new “motto” that reads: “Think Bravely: we believe that business can be bravely led, passionately collaborative, and world changing.” The introduction of this laboratory-cooked slogan caused much hand-wringing among Round 1 applicants, so now that we have a moment, we wanted to address it and help out those of you applying to Kellogg in Round 2. So, should you focus your applications on “Thinking Bravely”? Let’s break it down.

Yesterday was October 23rd. A relatively uneventful day for many humans, but a big one for a select group of Wharton applicants who received an interview invite. It’s obviously a magical moment to get that letter, err, email that says that mighty Wharton wants to talk to you. However, this year that feeling of excitement is lasting for about two seconds for most applicants as it is quickly replaced by a feeling of uncertainty. That’s because Wharton has partnered with the Wharton Innovation Group to come up with a whole new style of interviewing … the group interview.

MIT Sloan is one of “those” schools – the ones that seem to slip into the nooks and crannies of the admissions process. People don’t talk about Sloan as much as its elite counterparts. Nobody immediately thinks about it in terms of being a top 5 program until you start digging and realize, wow, this program is insanely good. Most importantly, because of its unique end-of-October deadline and equally unique two-round admissions process, we would wager that application quality on Sloan apps is far lower than on other top programs (which is a *massive* problem if you want to be admitted there). Candidates often don’t even start on their Sloan apps until after the October 3-16 gauntlet of deadlines and then they race to finish because they fear waiting until the “last” round.

Today’s blog post concerns the tricky Columbia Regular Decision deadline, which starts the day after Early Decision (which had a deadline of October 3rd this year) and extends all the way into April. While long, rolling deadlines are commonplace in college admissions or law school admissions, they are strangely out of place in the MBA space, which creates a lot of consternation on the part of applicants everywhere. Here’s the weird part though: normally when applicants ring their hands over something ambiguous and unfamiliar we tell them to buck up and have some courage (“Stop worrying so much,” is a common refrain around here), but in this case, there actually is some very real strategy to consider. We take into consideration a few rules of thumb, some common sense, and our own experiences sitting in the admissions officer’s chair to arrive at a recommendation.